7 Search Engine Optimization Strategy

Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making your web pages search engine friendly so that search engines are more easy to understand and analyze your website. Consequently, your site has a better chance to gain high search engine ranking.

However, please be reminded that high search engine ranking is not your only objective, and your objective should be website traffic and conversion. The following advice helps you to achieve the objectives.

1. Make Sure Your Site Will Not Be Penalized

Webmasters realize the importance of attaining top search engine rankings. Hence, they perform many search engine optimization activities on their sites. However, improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines. To avoid your website being penalized, webmasters must not commit to the following practices:

- Use of hidden texts or hidden links on web pages.
- Use of cloaking
- Excessive automated queries to search engines like Google
- Web pages loaded with irrelevant words
- Keyword stuffing
- Multiple pages, sub-domains, domains with substantially duplicate content

2. Select Correct Keyword Phrases

Correct keyword phrases allow you to drive targeted visitors to your website. Therefore, this step determines whether your search engine optimization effort can improve business result or not.

Do not restrict yourself and be open minded in this area. You may think that most of the search is coming from 1 word keyword. However, it is wrong. Most people uses 2-5 words keyword phrases because they are more descriptive and yield precise results from search engines.

In addition, think creatively and perform linguistics research can help you generate useful keyword phrases.

3. Optimize Title and Meta Tags

One of the important steps in search engine optimization is to optimize Title tag in your web page. Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag.

Some search engines also give importance to the presence of the keyword in the meta description and keyword tag. Currently, it does not applicable to Google though.

4. Optimize Website Content

All search engines place emphasis on your body text content. The main content of your web page should contain the keyword a considerable number of times to make the search engine spiders feel that the content is relevant to the search query. The first two paragraphs are extremely important in search engine optimization.

To prevent your site from being regarded as "over optimization", you should not stuff keywords heavily in your body content. We suggest that you should present the keywords in a natural way. Apart from this, your website copy should have at least 200-250 words.

5. Ensure Clean Coding

To allow search engines to index and analyze your website correctly, you must check correctness of HTML coding manually. Webmasters may build webpages from WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage 2003, but these HTML editors may leave some duplicated or unnecessary tags in your copy especially when you edit the pages very often during web design phase.

In addition, search engines are not good at understanding Java Applet and Flash. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well.

Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop search engine spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your search engine optimization effort.

6. Link Building

In case you have a little bit knowledge about search engine optimization, you likely know that link popularity is very important to attaining high search engine ranking in major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc..

Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine search engine rankings. The phiolosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. Therefore, the inbound link is regarded as a "positive vote" to your website. The more inbound link you have, the higher is your link popularity. This can boost your search engine ranking.

However, quality of links (link reputation) is also important. If you can get an inbound link from a high popularity website, your site will get more benefit.

There are many methods to perform link building including seeking one-way link, reciprocal links, 3-way links, etc. Because link popularity and link reputation are of great importance to search engine positions, many search engine optimizers spend most of their time in link building.

7. Optimize Dynamic Website Content

Search engines are not good at understanding dynamically generated web pages. Therefore, I suggest you should change your dynamic URL to static URL. If it is not possible, you should consider using some advanced search engine optimization techniques such as Mod-Rewrite to optimize website.

Another simpler way is to create a sitemap and list all dynamic URLs on it. This can help a bit.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is very important to search engine marketing. When it is done properly, it helps you attract many targeted visitors to your website, and can improve your business results.

Written by Jimsun Lui from Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd., a company offers Search engine optimization and search engine positioning service, the company also offers ecommerce solutions

---

SEO #4: Off-page Optimization

Yesterday you should have read the third course out of... Read More

6 Ways To Attract Search Engines To Your Website More Often

Adding fresh, updated content to your website is the surest... Read More

The Importance of Correct HTML Syntax in Search Engine Positoning

There is a lot of competition to get good spots... Read More

The Search Engine Of The Future: Mobility Has A Pricetag

We all know the ease of using a search engine... Read More

What Is Search Engine Marketing?

It's in our genes, we're driven to seek. We 'hunt'... Read More

3 Principles Of Google

When online "Use it. Use it. Use it."Google is our... Read More

How and Why to Avoid the SEO Mania

The WhyBut what is the reality of reaching a number... Read More

Seek Engines: What If Seek Had Bumped Out Search?

In the early days of the World Wide Web, when... Read More

Is Something Missing From Your Keywords Research? (Part 2)

In my previous article, I raised the issue that proper... Read More

Adding Content To Your Site Every Day

If you have been a webmaster for more than a... Read More

Affordable Small Business SEO: 5 Common SEO Errors and How to Fix Them

Don't put the cart before the horse.You can't do SEO... Read More

Absolute & Relative Links How Do They Rank?

The question for this article is whether or not you... Read More

Search Wars! - MSNs Opening Salvo

With all the recent publicity given to Google as the... Read More

Link Popularity --- Its Role and Importance In Getting Top Search Engine Rankings

Introduction"Link Popularity" ? these words may have caught your attention... Read More

Diary of a Google Gazumpee

Back in November, when the Google Dance began, Barry Lloyd... Read More

Effective Search Engine Use

The Internet is a wonderful place full of resources that... Read More

Page Rank - A Quick Overview for Beginners

Page Rank (PR) is a specific value for a website... Read More

Search Engine Visibility - The Mantra of Corporate Profitability

The corporate fundamentals are par excellence! The product is unsurpassable... Read More

A Three Day Marketing Plan for Better Google Rankings

If you're reading this article, you've probably discovered that simply... Read More

SEO - Google Sitemaps Explained

Once again I seem to be writing about Google. The... Read More

Search Engine Optimization :: The Basics and Why Websites Need It

We all know that the most targeted traffic we can... Read More

How To Choose Keywords Before they Skyrocket in Popularity

Long before the days of researching phrases with the helpful... Read More

Search Engine Optimization for Beginners

If you are confused about terms like "search engine optimization"... Read More

The Fundamentals of Inbound Links

We have all heard that adding quality content to your... Read More

Anatomy Of A Top Ranking Web page

Optimizing web pages for high rankings in the search engines... Read More

New MSN Search Engine: How Good is it?

If you have an online business or you just use... Read More

The First Search Engine Marketing Method: Content That Meets Customers Needs

For your business web site, good search engine rankings and... Read More

Search Engine Traffic Myths, Time Wasters, and Pitfalls

Everyone wants to increase their rankings with the search engines... Read More

Search Term Suggestion Tool

Overture.com offers a cool function to assist you on your... Read More

Breaking the Myth About Page Rank (PR)

The most difficult challenge most web designers face is getting... Read More

Why Top Search Engine Placements Never Move?

#1 question when it comes to web advertising is how... Read More

What is Your Sales Message?

So you built a website, you have a product, but... Read More

How to Google; or How to be Easily Distracted

I set out with the intention of writing a self... Read More